Social Networks and Spam
According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicited advertisements.
The Spam Problem
Out of those surveyed, two-thirds of respondents said they would consider switching social networks if the spam level became too frequent. The companies running the social networks need to take note of that - if anything, spam messages were one of the contributing factors in many people's decision to leave MySpace for Facebook. The amount of friend requests from people who weren't real got to be out-of-hand on MySpace - turning down those bots' requests became almost a daily chore.
But don't think that just because you've left MySpace behind that you're going to avoid the spam - it will just follow you to wherever you are. The report notes that over the past 12 months, respondents received an average of 64 unwanted friend requests, invites, or postings.
Image Courtesy of Facebook Talk
In fact, the security issues are the top reason why boomers (ages 40+) aren't joining social networks. Out of those surveyed who did not use social networks, the number one reason (at 47%) involves privacy and concerns about having personal information accessible on the web. While those issues may speak more to the boomers' mindset regarding how open you should be on the web with your personal information, the social network spam problem does nothing to help alleviate these non-participants' concerns, either.
Spam on Twitter and FriendFeed
We recently uncovered what had appeared to be some of the first FriendFeed spam, but was actually a malfunctioning API client. But as both FriendFeed and Twitter and other, newer social sites continue to rank higher and higher in search results, the spam problem on those networks is only going to increase. Take for example, this search for the terms "tumblr full text rss" - the number one result is a link to the RWW Twitter profile thanks to a tweet that also contained those same terms. Do a search for "Scoble" and you'll find Robert Scoble's Twitter and FriendFeed profiles on the first page of results. And Alex has been seeing this Twitter spam since last night:
With strong SEO like this, it's only a matter of time before we're fighting off spammers in this newer social networks, too.
And don't think it will always be easy to identify the spammers from rest either - those spammers can be crafty. Stop Twitter Spam notes that spammers are now scraping the public timeline to steal other people's tweets and re-purpose them as their own. Case in point is Twitter spammer jennyvalley (account no longer exists), whose profile had tweets from several different languages! Of course, that may be a clue that she's not legit, but it won't be too long until spammers refine this process to make the bot seem more like a real person.
Image Courtesy of Stop Twitter Spam
Twitter has taken the time to clean up the spammers recently and so far, FriendFeed seems to be flying under the radar (unless you count this), but it's only a matter of time before the spammers sign up there, too - especially once they realize the potential "Google juice" to be had.
To keep from getting spammed on your social sites, you must take precautions when on social networks - be careful who you friend and don't reveal info that could be used to steal your identity. If you're sending friend requests out for approval to people you don't actually know - like on Facebook, for example - a quick note explaining who you are and why you want to friend them can be helpful to identify you as "safe to friend," too.
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With these spammers using sophisticated bots, it's quite hard to tell if the message you are getting is from a human.
With more and more social networking services merging with large sites like the case of Mybloglog and Yahoo, it wouldn't be hard for spammers to get personal infos.
The key idea is to leverage the power of personal social networks itself to eliminate SPAM. In this post I discuss an architecture which is 100% guaranteed to be SPAM-free, both for incoming streams, as well as friend requests. Plus, you only get information you really want.
I kinda feel like the people who suffer from spam attacks are the people who add "friends" or "contacts" that aren't really "friends" or "contacts" ... in which case, you are in a sense trying to reach more and more people with your content, message, media or whatever through rampant social networking, but don't want to pay the piper when other people beat you at your own game.
No?
There must be a lot of money in spam. I don't think we are ever going to get rid of it. The spammers ruin the internet for everybody.
The Masked Millionaire
I have experienced spam on Facebook a couple of times with friends accounts being used to distribute the messages. No where near on the level of MySpace, hence the reason I deleted my profile there a while ago! Twitter so far has been good to me as I haven't received anything yet but I am overly selective of who I follow!!
Raskin, I think just about anybody can be targeted by Twitter Spam. The spammers often harvest Twitter ID's from the public timeline and use that list to follow hundreds of people at a time (which results in a New Follower email). So someone who is only following 10 people might get hit with spam just because their Twitter ID showed up on the timeline. The only way to protect against that is to make your updates protected, which kind of defeats the purpose of Twitter. Other spammers use scripts to automatically someone's friends. So if you follow popular people on Twitter (Scoble, Arrington, etc.) you might get targeted because your appeared in a list of Followers. The big challenge for Twitter is all of this info is available on the public web and it costs no money (only time) for the spammers to compile these lists of thousands.
Posted by: mdoeff.myopenid.com
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July 8, 2008 9:11 AM
At twitturls.com, a full 20% of the links we crawl from the public timeline are spam. This has been trending significantly up. Most of the code for the site is written to detect and delete spam before it reaches the homepage.
Good post.. I've already been "had" by a couple..
The one that "hurt" the most, if you will, was an entity I've followed for many, many years going back to my days when I was the (now defunct) Lifetips.com FavoriteWebsite guru.. This particular entity in question recently sent out an email just to tell everyone to follow them on a handful of social networking sites..
So you byte, and follow them on several social networks.. A day or so later, they return the favor giving you that, "Ah, that was nice.." warm fuzzies feeling..
If you check back a few weeks later, though, you'll discover they've quietly deleted *everyone* from their friends even as they publicly continue to try to rope in more people.. Meanwhile, most don't even notice they are the only ones now doing the following and thus effectively bumping up the entity while they themselves have been ditched..
Granted, is nothing new for social networking as those doing it these days likely cut their teeth doing the same over at Yahoo! 360 a couple of years ago.. :)
Again, *really* good post..
Cyber hugs from North Georgia.. :)
Great post! Nobody likes a spammer...I wonder if spammers even like themselves!
I noticed that Facebook is sadly becoming more spammy. When it used to be reserved for college students with school email addresses, spam was non-existent. Now that anyone can create an account, the site has become a hot spot for spammers and scammers. I posted a listing in the marketplace not too long and and only had shady scammers respond. It's a shame that the site has become a bit more spammy, but that's what happens when a site opens themselves up to the entire population. I understand it's difficult for larger websites like Facebook to monitor this, but I feel that it's their duty to keep users happy and safe from junk.
Salesconx has issues with spammers from time to time since we're an online marketplace for business referrals, but we deal with the false listing/users immediately. We see every listing as soon as it goes public, and if it's something shady, we remove it and warn the user. If the problem continues, we ban the user. Since we monitor all of these things closely, our quality remains high and spam/scams are basically non-existent.
-Gina
Marketing Manager
Salesconx
I thought that getting connected to 500 friends (including strangers) in Facebook networks is spam. I mean, how the hell one can make friends with 200, 500 or more with people that one doesn't really know. I call that spam.
The Mask Millionare said...
There must be a lot of money in spam
No, I think that you got it the wrong way. There is huge money to be made from people who have joined Facebook or any other social networking sites, because of huge potential of targeted ads (to members).
The article is quite timely, I've had 3 friend spam requests from Twitter in the last 24 hours. Prior to the last 24 hours? None.
The other problem is, the more connected and / or popular we become, the bigger a target we become, too...
I haven't had any spams on facebook or twitter. It looks like I have that to look forward to. I agree that social networks need to invest in ways to protect their customers.
The most spammed social networking site is ORKUT..It looks like 90% of messages on Orkut are spams
Hi,
We have incorperated a "Banned" option, so that if someone repeatedly sends you spam you can ban this person from contacting you. However you are still able to contact them if you wish to do so. There is the option to unban someone if you wish to do so. It does stop continious spamming.
Hope this is of help.
I wrote a article on this the other day
spam and social networks is inherent you are never going to get rid of it. Everyone spams in one way or another
And you always know its spam just delete it.
Everyone wants to be on top of the search engines everyone has something to sell so whilst you have that you will have spam.
All the best from a rainy uk
I have no friends. I'm a misanthrope. And yet for some reason, I've gotten 15 followers on Twitter in the last few days for my uninteresting and infrequent posts. They all seem to be new members, with maybe 5 or 6 tweets to their names. Definitely a new breed of spam.
> Case in point is Twitter spammer jennyvalley (account no
> longer exists), whose profile had tweets from several
> different languages!
As does mine.
When I'm engaging in an English-language conversation, I tweet in English... Mais j'engage dans les conversations en Francais aussi...
Hell, I've even been known to Tweet in Latin from time to time - In liguam latinam twitavi.
I hope that tweeting in multiple languages (or for that matter commenting) doesn't start being correllated with spam :-(
I have been a big proponent of human intervention. The future of social networking will be held in the hands of selected few. These selected few will have to work hard however. Don't be greedy for the buck, start MANUALLY approving new profiles or registrations. Implement technics to combat scam, ban countries known for harboring scammers, monitor posts before they become visible to the rest of the public!
Great post. This is a warn for me even I didn't have any experience regarding spam on social networks yet.
Thanks for sharing
I have yet to experience much spamming on Facebook. If you keep it under control by knowing who the people on your frineds list are and modifying your privacy settings then it's not too bad.
We've this problem at jaxboo, and we're only a very new site, but since we're a mix of mini-shops with knowledge, spammers try to leave lots and lots of spam comments and false trackbacks. Fortunately askimet works very well.
With everyone expert, professor, marketer and neighbour writing about the potential of viral marketing and the use of social networking is it any wonder that there is a plethera of spamming going on.
I don't think its too much of a problem if it relevant to the environment it is put in. If it is pointing users to sites they may be interested in. Though ringtone adverts do tend to annoy me, though mainly because many sites are a scam.
That in mind here's a link to my blog (haha)where i discuss more issure to do with marketing and social networks, no 'free' ringtones included
http://facevaluebook.blogspot.com/
Hey, don't y'all get it? Friend requests ARE the new spam. It's just a matter of time until it's hard to find real friend requests among all the spammy ones, just like email before spam filters.
I can't wait until I get a friend request from a deposed Nigerian dictator who needs my help in an urgent matter of the greatest secrecy.
It's terribly ironic that 90% of the people commenting here link to sites like "Free Ebooks", "Online Dating", and askmehowtobecomeamillionaire.douchebag.com.
I think one problem with this is that most teens want to have a bunch of friends regardless if they really know them or not, so when these bots come alone and send friend requests they are too willing to say yes to them, and once that starts here comes the Spam!
If you program a social network you must experiment with honey pots techniques to avoid spam users.
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this directory of social networking sites
The new model to deal with spam will be a community reinforced watch program.. (remember neighborhood watch when you were little)... community members should be able to rate user credibility... and if it negatively passes a threshold, the user is expelled and burned at the stake... jk... check out how this works in a web 3.0 model!!! ... www.gothamtechminute.blogspot.com
It is hard to keep spam from these sites and continue to keep them user friendly. Although there are ways to slow down (not stop) spam, some will always make it through. Much like security helps WiFi networks, it will only slow down those who want in, if there is a will...There is a way.
If the "real world" were as busy attempting to protect themselves as we in the "virtual world" are nothing would ever get done.
Can a gas station get robbed? Yes... therefore we should never open a gas station.
Can a grocery store be set on fire? Yes... therefore no one should be caught dead owning a grocery store.
I think you get the idea.
Yes, it's important to be careful whereever you are. And yes, there are crooks on every corner. But if we spend the bulk of our time making sure we don't get taken to the cleaners progress will surely die an ugly death.
The moral of this story...
Be cautious but not crazy.